TMX names Nick De Klerk to lead Global Centre of Excellence

TMX Transform has appointed Nick De Klerk as Managing Director of its new Global Centre of Excellence, bringing him back to Australia after a stint building the company's North American business.

He will lead a new technology function built around Xchange, software developed internally by TMX for use across the business. The system draws on the company's experience delivering supply chain and property projects for clients including L'Oréal, Coca-Cola, Hasbro and Coles.

Over the past two and a half years, De Klerk expanded TMX's North American supply chain practice, growing the local team from one person to almost 30 and delivering triple-digit growth.

His return comes as TMX moves to standardise how its teams work across regions as it expands in the US and Europe. The Centre of Excellence is intended to connect expertise from different markets so teams do not develop separate methods in each geography.

New platform

Xchange underpins that effort as the operating system for the new unit. The software is based on delivery knowledge built up over more than 15 years of transformation work and is being prepared for a company-wide rollout following security testing.

The platform is described as a step-by-step playbook for different project types, with tools available at each stage. Its aim is to make specialist knowledge more consistently available across strategy, design, procurement and implementation work.

TMX employs more than 200 specialists, many of whom have held senior operational and C-suite roles in the sectors they advise. Its work spans supply chain strategy, distribution networks, automation, industrial property procurement and project delivery.

Before moving into consulting leadership, De Klerk began his career as an automation engineer. He later moved into warehouse and supply chain network design, working with teams across Australia, South East Asia, the Middle East, the UK and the US.

Growth plans

The appointment reflects a broader push by consulting firms to capture internal know-how in software and shared systems as they expand internationally. For firms operating across multiple time zones and industry sectors, delivery consistency has become a bigger operational challenge as projects spread across regions.

One of the central challenges in scaling into new markets is ensuring teams can draw on the same depth of expertise regardless of location. The new centre is intended to address that by capturing knowledge from practitioners and making it available through a single framework.

TMX also highlighted that artificial intelligence will be used within the Centre of Excellence. De Klerk outlined his view of that approach.

"My ambition is to strengthen TMX globally, which means finding a way to capture our people's knowledge and deploy it consistently across every market we operate in. We're using AI in a very deliberate way within the Centre of Excellence, not to replace our people, but to enable them. Clients come to TMX for the surety and subject matter expertise our people bring, and we need to optimise our business to champion that on an increasingly bigger scale," said Nick De Klerk, Managing Director, Centre of Excellence, TMX Transform.

Chief Executive Officer Travis Erridge linked the move to the company's international expansion and the need for common methods across teams.

"This is fundamental to TMX's next phase of growth. As we take on more clients across more markets, we need every team, in every region, drawing on the same depth of expertise rather than reinventing it market by market. We give our clients the confidence to implement change in a rapidly evolving supply chain landscape, and the Centre of Excellence is how we protect that at scale, wherever they engage us. There's no one better placed to lead it than Nick," said Travis Erridge, Chief Executive Officer, TMX Transform.